Adding immensely to the furor was the voice of former president Theodore Roosevelt, who was not in the least discouraged by the U.S. Army’s attempt to stifle his plan to raise a volunteer division. On April 10, Roosevelt went to the White House to ask Wilson’s approval. The two men, by this time ingrained political enemies, managed a surface cordiality. According to Roosevelt, he told Wilson that he only wanted to make the president’s war message “good.” It had to be translated into “fact” before it would rank as a great state paper. Roosevelt wanted to persuade the nation “to live up to the speech.”6
It would be hard to imagine a more disastrous approach to a man who regarded his oratory as the very essence of his presidency. Wilson did not think his speech needed any help from Roosevelt, and he was not about to let the hero of San Juan Hill tell the country and the world that TR had been assigned this task by the man he had called a Byzantine logothete.
Nevertheless, Wilson listened patiently to Roosevelt’s plan. The volunteer division would be composed of the cream of American manhood. TR had already persuaded Major General Leonard Wood, former army chief of staff and a leading prewar spokesman for preparedness, to add his professional expertise. There would be a German-American regiment to demonstrate that group’s patriotism, and a black regiment, with white officers. Descendants of Civil War and Revolutionary War heroes had already volunteered—a Lee, a Jackson, a Sheridan. French nobility, in memory of the services of the Marquis de Lafayette, would serve on the staff. Dozens of young regular army officers were offering to whip these amateurs into fighting soldiers. They would be ready for the trenches of the Western Front by September 1, 1917.
Afterward, according to Joe Tumulty’s memoir, Wilson said that Roosevelt was “a great big boy” and claimed he was charmed by his personality. Tumulty added that the president was inclined to overrule the general staff and let Roosevelt have his division. This comment was another attempt to put in Wilson’s mouth emotions and ideas that Tumulty wished Wilson shared. The historical record indicates that Roosevelt’s push for his volunteer division played a crucial role in Wilson’s decision to back conscription.7
This much is certain—there was no hint of reciprocal charm in the way Wilson handled Roosevelt’s proposal. He used a technique that the British Foreign Office had perfected on American protests against the blockade of Germany: the silent stall.
Meanwhile, Congress began debating the conscription bill. Roosevelt, getting the message from Wilson’s silence, was soon telling reporters that he found “great confusion” in the president’s mind. He had been forced to explain in almost embarrassing detail why the division was important and how it would work. The implication was all too clear: Wilson, the logothete, the man of words, could not grasp the thinking of Roosevelt, the man of action.8
In Congress, the anti-drafters turned to Roosevelt’s volunteer division as a perfect excuse to oppose conscription.“If Roosevelt or any other Pied Piper can whistle 25,000 fanatics after him, for Heaven’s sake give him a chance,” cried Representative Augustus Peabody Gardner of Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge’s son-in-law. The remark again revealed the naive assurance that there was no compelling need to send a large number of American soldiers to fight on the Western Front.9
TR’s voter appeal was still tremendous. Soon, an alarmed Secretary of War Baker was forced to write to Roosevelt, publicly rejecting his volunteer division and urging him to desist. Congress’s refusal to pass the conscription bill was brewing a national crisis. Baker might have added that enlistments, which were by no means barred during this uproar, were negligible—a mere 73,000 men had volunteered for the army out of a potential pool of 10 million. Only the U.S. Navy was getting all the men it wanted. This was further evidence of the widespread assumption that there would be no U.S. Army in Europe and that the navy was the only place where a man was likely to see action.10
Roosevelt’s response was a ferocious public letter to Baker, denying his plan interfered with the draft, which he favored. He lectured the secretary on the “moral effect” of sending his volunteers to France and sneered at Baker’s argument that it would be wiser to train an American army at home, while the Allies did all the fighting with U.S. money and munitions. Roosevelt was intimating that this was more of the gutless cowardice endemic in the White House and the rest of the Wilson administration. In a final blast, the former president denounced the entire Army general staff as a bunch of red-tape-entangled numskulls, who would not recognize a good idea if it ran over them.11
Neither Baker nor Wilson could have been consoled by the rain of criticism that descended on them from around the country and abroad. Roosevelt was enormously popular in France and England, thanks to his long-running call for U.S. participation in the war. Numerous prominent figures in both countries bombarded the White House with protesting telegrams. Roosevelt, encouraged by this praise of his brainchild, expanded his proposal from a division to an army corps of 200,000 volunteers. General Wood would be in command, and Teddy would be satisfied to lead a division. Roosevelt’s four sons proclaimed their readiness to fight beside their warrior father.12
For a while, it looked as if Roosevelt would get his way. On April 28, Republican Senator Warren Harding of Ohio added an amendment to the conscription bill, directing Wilson to let Roosevelt raise 100,000 volunteers. The proposal passed, 56 to 31, with Democrats deserting the president in droves. A delighted Roosevelt sent a telegram to Harding, congratulating him for his “patriotic work.” But TR’s celebration was premature. In the House of Representatives, many conservative Republicans had never forgiven Roosevelt for bolting the party in 1912 to run for president on the Progressive ticket, handing the election to Wilson. Added to these recalcitrants was the bloc of antiwar representatives around Congressman James R. Mann. This group was disinclined to forgive Roosevelt for calling them traitors when they supported Wilson in his peace-without-victory phase. When the Roosevelt amendment came to a vote, it lost by a decisive 170 to 106.
The congressmen, in one of those about-faces that frequently surprise outsiders, now voted overwhelmingly in favor of the administration’s conscription bill, 313 to 109. This inspired the Senate to do a similar 180degree turn and approve the measure 81 to 8. But when the two houses tried to harmonize the bills in a conference, another huge wrangle erupted over Roosevelt’s continued pursuit of his volunteer corps. His persistence won him not a little criticism in the press and a public rebuke by the Army League of the United States, a clone of the pro-war Navy League. Roosevelt blasted the Army League for playing petty politics on Wilson’s behalf. Anyone else who said he was interfering with the president’s wishes was guilty of “hysteria.” In the conference, three Republican senators deserted Teddy, and the Harding amendment was dropped from the bill.
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, by this time alarmed over growing criticism in the newspapers, urged Roosevelt to give up. The former president grudgingly agreed. Whereupon the House of Representatives, obviously hoping to placate Roosevelt’s supporters in the electorate, did another about-face and voted 215 to 178 to give Roosevelt some sort of independent command. This reversal produced another week of wrangling in the conference committee, which finally solved the matter by passing the conscription bill and giving Wilson the authority to commission TR and his volunteers if he so desired—something every man, woman and child over the age of six knew was never going to happen.13
It was now May 17, six weeks since Wilson had made his war speech. That afternoon, John M. Parker of Louisiana visited the White House. One of the South’s major political figures, he had been nominated as vice president by the Progressive Party in 1916. When Roosevelt decided not to run as a Progressive, Parker had campaigned for Wilson and helped him carry several key states. Parker urged the president to give Roosevelt his division and put General Wood in charge of it:“I beg of you . . . at this crisis not to play politics!” he said.
Wilson kept his temper and replied that it was the Republicans who were
playing politics: “I do not propose to have politics in any manner, shape or form influence me in my judgment.”14
The truth—or lack thereof—in those words was demonstrated within twenty-four hours, when Wilson refused to appoint two men to important posts in the War Department, because they were Republicans. One of them was Henry L. Stimson, President Taft’s secretary of war. Stimson would have to wait until another war with Germany to win an appointment from a Democratic president. For the present, he satisfied his martial ardor by joining the fighting army as a colonel in the Seventy-Seventh Division.15
The president signed the conscription bill on May 18, and added a public rejection of Roosevelt as a volunteer general.“This is not the time for any action not calculated to contribute to the immediate success of the war,” Wilson intoned.“The business now in hand is undramatic, practical, and of scientific definiteness and precision.”16
This rejection surely has to be one of Wilson’s strangest utterances. He made the war sound like something that was going to happen in a laboratory. It was not what those who opposed conscription wanted to hear. They still feared that blood would run in the streets on draft registration day. Wilson was responding to those who had opposed volunteerism, because, in Walter Lippmann’s words, to make it work would require a newspaper campaign that “manufactured hatred,” in the style of the British press. A prominent Boston banking house had made a similar argument in a circular letter, claiming that volunteers could only be obtained by letting the press stir up “an unjustified sense of crisis,” which would be bad for the stock market. Once more, we see these insiders assuming that the war was as good as won by the Allies—and Wilson agreeing with them. All concerned were also covertly admitting that enthusiasm for the war was neither deep nor widespread.17
In the evening of May 18, Henry Cabot Lodge and two Republican senatorial colleagues visited Wilson in the White House. The atmosphere was superficially cordial. They talked for almost two hours, discussing how to get food to the Allies as fast as possible without causing shortages in the United States, which had experienced two poor wheat harvests in a row. Another topic was censorship—how to deal with war news, good and bad, and with antiwar opinion. Lodge was in an arrogant mood. He and his colleagues enjoyed telling Wilson “some truths which he ought to have heard from those who surround him.. . . Without the Republicans he could not get his legislation.” The wrangle over the conscription bill made that fact very clear.
More important than politics was Lodge’s personal reaction to Wilson:“I watched and studied his face tonight as I have often done before—a curious mixture of acuteness, intelligence and extreme underlying timidity—a shifty, furtive sinister expression can always be detected by a good observer.”18
More than political partisanship separated these two men. Lodge was a strong advocate of U.S. involvement in world affairs. From his election as senator in 1893, his greatest ambition was to become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He saw an active foreign policy as crucial to forming America’s national character.
Lodge believed that American idealism could become a more significant force in world affairs than the often “sordid” imperialism of Britain, France and Russia. He was also a strong advocate of some sort of international organization that would keep the peace. In 1915, in a speech to Union College’s commencement exercises, he said world peace could only be maintained by “united nations” that were willing to use force when necessary.19
For Lodge the worst foreign policy sin was inaction and pale neutrality. During the first 21/2 years of World War I, Wilson seemed to embody these vices. Wilson’s claim that the United States was “too proud to fight” (in a speech after the Lusitania sinking) and his pursuit of peace without victory had struck Lodge as close to blasphemy. The declaration of war had not changed his opinion of the president’s character.20
III
There was another reason why Wilson did not consider it his job to arouse patriotic enthusiasm for volunteerism—or conscription. He had found the right man for this formidable task, and he was already hard at work. His name was George Creel.
A native of Missouri, the forty-one-year-old Creel often styled himself as “the original Wilson man.” He had boomed Wilson to run for president as early as 1905, when he was still presiding over Princeton University. At that time, Creel was a muckraking journalist of some renown and a political dreamer who liked to think big. He was also not given to moderation. A journalist friend said: “To Creel there are only two classes of men. There are skunks and the greatest man who ever lived. The greatest man is plural and includes everyone who is on Creel’s side in whatever public issue he happens to be concerned with.” In a rare moment of candor, Creel admitted this description was not entirely wrong.
In the 1916 campaign, Creel had written a book, Wilson and the Issues, and worked hard for the president’s reelection. A few days after war was declared, Wilson summoned Creel to the White House to discuss how to deal with the information side of the conflict. In Britain and France, iron censorship was the rule and the generals and admirals in the State, War and Navy Building were demanding a similar setup in the United States. Creel told Wilson it was not suppression but expression that the country needed. Public opinion about the war had been “muddled,” Creel said, by the thirty-two-month battle between German and Allied propaganda. Creel recommended forming a Committee on Public Information that would handle the war news and inspire Americans to see the struggle as a patriotic crusade.21
The idea jibed with an approach to news that Wilson had long favored. In his first term, his attempts to ingratiate himself with the Washington press corps had been an egregious failure. Most reporters, he had concluded, were only interested in “the personal and trivial rather than in principles and politics.” He had eventually abandoned press conferences and given Joe Tumulty the job of dealing with newsmen. For a while Wilson toyed with the idea of creating a government publicity bureau that would dispense the “real facts” while the newspapers supposedly continued to distort and trivialize them.22
The Committee on Public Information would, Wilson hoped, be the realization of this dubious dream. He made Creel chairman of the enterprise. To bolster his authority, Wilson added three cabinet members to the committee, Secretary of State Lansing, Secretary of War Baker and Secretary of the Navy Daniels. Chairman Creel held one meeting with these gentlemen, listened gravely to their advice, and never conferred with them again.“The Committee on Public Information was George Creel,” wrote Mark Sullivan, a fellow newspaperman who knew him well.“It continued to be George Creel after a hundred and fifty thousand people were taking part in its incredibly varied and far flung activities.”23
Creel’s goal was to create the “war will.” In a democracy, he believed, this will depended on “the degree to which each one of all the people of that democracy can concentrate and consecrate body and soul and spirit in a supreme effort of spirit and sacrifice.” that consecration could only be achieved by creating “a passionate belief in the justice of America’s cause that [would] meld the people of the United States into one white hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage and deathless determination.” The feverish prose was typical Creel.24
Creel was also not shy about playing politics. When the Vigilantes, a patriotic organization that had been fighting for preparedness, offered Creel the services of some eighty leading writers, the former muckraker replied: “We don’t want you. You’re all Roosevelt men!” Creel was not planning to share his fiefdom with anyone.25
Reports from British agents in the United States to Wellington House made it clear that a patriotic state of mind was virtually nonexistent in the United States two months after Wilson’s war message. “There is evidence that in many localities the people have only entered the war with reluctance and with a feeling of inevitability rather than with any enthusiasm,” wrote the author of the American Press Résumé on May 23, 1917. Joe Tumulty nervously informe
d Colonel House that “the people’s ‘righteous wrath’ seems not to have been aroused.” the widespread lack of enthusiasm observed by British Ambassador Cecil Spring Rice and intelligence chief William Wiseman before Wilson’s April 2 speech was obviously not overdrawn. 26
A few days after Creel began to organize his committee, a young man named Donald Ryerson of Chicago burst into his office and told Creel that he headed a group of volunteer speakers who were making patriotic talks in movie theaters. In ten minutes, Creel escalated the idea to a national effort dubbed Four Minute Men, and put Ryerson in charge of it. From its first days, Creel said with typical hyperbole, the Four Minute Men “had the projectile force of a French .75” (the French army’s favorite artillery piece). Soon, tens of thousands of these local orators were at work. In movie theaters across the nation, a glass slide was thrown on the curtain before or after the main feature.
FOUR MINUTE MEN
[Name of speaker]
Will speak four minutes on a subject of national importance.
He speaks under the authority of
THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC INFORMATION
GEORGE CREEL, CHAIRMAN
WASHINGTON, D.C.27
The Creel committee sent the Four Minute Men various bulletins about the state of the war effort, including several sample speeches written by top advertising copywriters on the committee’s staff. The speakers were warned against stereotyped oratory and urged to transform the material into personal statements whenever possible. They soon expanded their operations from movie theaters to lodge and labor union meetings, church halls, lumber camps, and even Native American reservations. Before the war ended, no less than 75,000 Four Minute Men would be orating on Creel-assigned topics, aimed at creating a white-hot war will.28
The Illusion of Victory Page 12